of barbarism. In no state or
city can egotism, either of the hot-blooded or cold-blooded kind,--and
the latter is far the more virulent,--be far to seek. On the other hand,
no social system, thank God, can quite reverse the better instincts of
humanity; and it may be freely granted that even American slavery shades
off, here and there, into quite tender modifications. Yet not in all the
world could there possibly be found an antagonism so deep and intense as
exists here. The Old World seems to have thrown upon the shores of the
New its utmost extremes, its Oriental barbarisms and its orients and
auroras of hope and belief; so that here coexist what Asia was three
thousand years ago, and what Europe may be one thousand years hence. Let
us consider the actual _status_.

In certain localities of Southern Africa there is a remarkable fly, the
Tsetse fly. In the ordinary course of satisfying its hunger, this insect
punctures the skin of a horse, and the animal dies in consequence. A fly
makes a lunch, and a horse's life pays the price of the meal. This has
ever seemed to me to represent the beast-of-prey principle in Nature
more vigorously than any other fact. But in that system whose fangs
are now red with the blood of our brave there is an expression of this
principle not less enormous. It is the very Tsetse fly of civilization.
That a small minority of Southern men may make money without earning
it,--that a few thousand individuals may monopolize the cotton-market
of the world,--what a suppression and destruction of intelligence it
perpetrates I what consuming of spiritual possibilities! what mental
wreck and waste! Whites, too, suffer equally with blacks. Less
oppressed, they are perhaps even more demoralized. No parallel example
does the earth exhibit of the sacrifice of transcendent values for
pitiful ends.

In attempting to destroy free government and rational socialization in
America, this system is treading no new road, it is only proceeding on
the old. Its central law is that of destroying any value, however
great, for the sake of any gratification, however small. Accustomed to
battening on the hopes of humanity,--accustomed to taking stock in
human degradation, and declaring dividends upon enforced ignorance and
crime,--existing only while every canon of the common law is annulled,
and every precept of morals and civilization set at nought,--could it be
expected to pause just when, or rather just _because_, it ha